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Wednesday, 19 December 2012

'The end of local government as we know it' - response to Birmingham City Council's budget consultation

Birmingham City Council are facing what the Council leader recently described as 'the end of local government as we know it'. Here's my response to BCC's consultation on their 2012-13 budget. You can see the proposals, and respond too, at: http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/budgetviews

To whom it may concern:

I’m grateful for the opportunity to respond through the Budget Consultation
process, and I hope many other Birmingham citizens have also done so.

My response is largely around the general principles (what you call ‘the
wider service delivery issues’ in the document) rather than the particularities
of individual budget lines.

I’m sure cliches have already been over-used in this conversation, but I’m
afraid the cliche that springs to mind is about ‘rearranging deckchairs on the
Titanic’. It is becoming increasingly clear that the figures, projected into the
future, mean not only that so-called ‘salami slicing’ of services is an
ineffective response, but even that an approach that ‘preserves’ some services
while cutting others will not be going far enough. Albert Bore’s description of
‘the end of local government as we know it’ is correct, and what is needed is a
radically different approach to local government. Rather than ‘restructuring the
building’, I would suggest, what is needed, unavoidably, is to begin the work of
imagining what might be built, what seeds planted and nurtured, in the rubble
that is left behind.

1) Who will be able to think the unthinkable?

I would humbly suggest that those best-equipped to do this imagining might
include some council members and officers with an ability to think far enough
‘outside the box’, but that the pressures of working within the current system
may well mean that many will find that just too difficult. Those of us who work
in what is often called the ‘Third’ (and sometimes, more recently, the ‘Tired’)
Sector have, I would suggest, a wealth of experience not simply in surviving on
a shoestring, but on the kind of creative reinvention that is needed for
Birmingham.

My first suggestion, then, would be an urgent need, not for another
consultation exercise, or polite listening, but for getting the right
people in rooms, together, with a blank sheet of paper, across all the areas and
departments in which the Council currently provides, or aspires to provide, some
kind of service – to re-imagine what kind of support will be needed for
Birmingham to survive, and ideally thrive. As a concrete example, I would want
to highlight the work of the Chamberlain Forum as being ideally placed to enable
such thinking to happen and develop.

2) A radical approach that starts with neighbourhoods

The traditional model of ‘service provision’ is almost dead. That will,
inevitably, mean huge losses, both in terms of council employees but also in
terms of what local neighbourhoods will no longer benefit from. I would suggest,
however, that in the crisis there is also an opportunity, and it is an
opportunity to rediscover ourselves as a city, begin with our local
neighbourhoods. There are many things that are ‘provided’ as ‘services’ that
neighbourhoods are actually, with adequate resourcing, much better at doing
themselves. There is clear evidence, for example, that the most significant
factors that make people feel safe and secure is not police presence, but the
levels of trust between neighbours, and the frequency with which people in a
neighbourhood gather together outdoors. There is also clear evidence that the
wellbeing of the most vulnerable people – children & young people, older
people, and adults in between – is maximised not within institutions, but within
communities of mutual care.

What I’m suggesting here is not ‘big society’ – a policy that looks for all
the world like a smokescreen for massive cuts in public services, with nothing
positive to replace them apart from some patronising moral exhortations
emanating from comfortable Oxfordshire villages. It is also not simply about
‘devolving to District Committees’, as if that somehow solves anything – merely
displacing the same old problems to a lower level on the chain (something that
central government have been doing very ‘successfully’ themselves, as Birmingham
can testify).

What I am suggesting needs resourcing. But it needs a kind of resourcing
that is utterly different from ‘service provision’. It also, helpfully, can be
done very effectively with rather less money. It is not about ‘neighbourhood
management’, although that was a very good initiative in this direction. There
will, after all, be rather less services for communities to manage or
commission. This is about community development. Paid people, in each
local neighbourhood (and ‘local’ means ‘local’ here – if it’s not within walking
distance, it’s not ‘local’) of the city, who are trained and skilled in
connecting people, building relationships, growing trust, nurturing friendships,
drawing out people’s skills and confidence and knowledge and passions. It is, as
the Social Cohesion Inquiry has at least begun to realise about identifying,
unlocking, and connecting the ‘assets’ within people and communities so often
labelled in ‘deficit’ terms – but using them to grow things from the grassroots,
not to support a creaking, disintegrating, top-down structure.

Again, it is often the 3rd Sector that knows better than most how to do
this. But even ‘we’ are often so tied in to the ‘service provision’ mentality
that we fail to do what needs doing most.

Yes, Birmingham needs infrastructure, and it would be easy and obvious for
the City Council to focus on that. But Birmingham needs strong, resilient and
caring communities more. If we’re asking the hardest questions about what BCC
spends its money on, I would argue this has to come first, before anything else
– because everything else will flow from this. BCC is in the best possible
position to commission the recruitment, training, and support of such a network
of community developers – and it will pay dividends. The evidence from a
programme such as ‘Near Neighbours’ in significant sections of the city would
back this up.

There is, of course, an ‘equality’ question in all of this. Clearly some
neighbourhoods will need more ‘intense’ work, others will require a ‘lighter
touch’. There are measures around that will help with that judgement, but they
may not be the traditional ‘deprivation’ indices. Levels of social capital,
social infrastructure, and formal/informal co-production (again, see Chamberlain
Forum’s work in this area) will be the key indicators.

3) Relationship with central government

As an outsider to the workings of ‘government’, I can only imagine what
goes on behind the scenes in the relationship between local and central
government. I would suggest, however, that we are again moving into radically
new terrain in that relationship. While central government slashes and burns
local government’s powers and budget (especially in authorities like Birmingham,
particularly dependent on central funding), ‘responsibility’ (for picking up the
pieces) is devolved to local level like never before.

It must surely be time for cities like Birmingham to find creative ways to
vocally and powerfully resist the central government agenda and its impact on
our communities, especially where it hits the poorest and most vulnerable. It
may be an uncomfortable alliance, but I would suggest Birmingham City Council
might find a whole new strength in forging links with groups as diverse as
Citizens UK and UK Uncut, to make the people power of Birmingham known in the
corridors of Westminster.

In conclusion, I appreciate these may well be answers to questions that you
haven’t quite been asking, and that as answers go they may be either beyond what
feels currently imaginable, or too vague to be of use. Whatever happens, please
have the courage to not allow the vested interests and impoverished imaginations
of those who wish to preserve their own small patch of ‘status quo’ to, if not
win the day, at least paralyse any possibility of meaningful action. The ship is
sinking, and we need to be hard at work making the best possible
lifeboats.

With warmest wishes,

Revd Al
Barrett

Church of
England Priest, Hodge Hill Church(St Philip & St James C of E in
partnership with Hodge Hill URC)"Growing Loving Community... in the love of
God ♥ with all our neighbours ♥ across Hodge Hill"

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About Me

Firs & Bromford Estate, East Birmingham, West Midlands, United Kingdom

Since 23/9/10 I've been Anglican priest ('Vicar' to the rest of the world) for the parish of Hodge Hill, East Birmingham. Among other things, that means 'getting out there' as much as possible, making friends, listening lots, and nurturing a church community that is committed to 'growing loving community with all our neighbours'. On the side I'm a husband, a dad to an 8-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl, and have just finished a PhD developing a 'radically receptive' political theology / missiology in the urban margins.